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Internauts Complaining that Police taking over their Computers Needlessly

Getreading.co.uk reported on 3rd September, 2013 stating that officers of Bracknell (Berkshire, England) have received complaints from people about their computers which have reportedly been taken over or seized by Police while watching explicit websites.

Police notes that the computers screen exhibits a message appearing to be sent by the national police force featuring many convincing logos of police.

It then asks people to pay a fine of 200 pound for watching the content and grants them two days (or 48 hours) to pay the fine by employing a system known as 'UPAY'.

In actuality UPAY is an undetectable money transferring system usually employed by fraudsters, Police warns.

The message displayed on the computer screen is in reality a computer Trojan precisely ransomware that has contaminated the computer when users watching videos and it allows scammers to get control of the computer.

Officials observe that ransomware is a global phenomenon which criminals have learnt to localize and customize their software to make the threat appear scarier so that victims act quickly without thinking. For example, in the U.S. the message may display logo of FBI and in Germany the logo would be of a German law enforcement agency as highlighted in the above case.

Police advises users to treat the appearance of ransomware as any other malware and examine how it got into the system and look for other malware like Trojans or backdoors which might have come along with ransomware.

Police are advising Internauts not to give any cash as it will lost ultimately because it's more or less certain that fraudsters are based at abroad and it will be awfully difficult to trace them. Once they get accessibility to the computers, the scammers can embezzle bank credentials and passwords.

However, if you have been infected with this malware then you should get your computer fixed by a reputed engineer and where an individual has been swindled into paying unnecessary fine then he/she should report to local police authorities. Internauts should run AV (anti-virus) software and always keep it updated.